More Views

The Unpersuadables

Product Description

While excavating fossils in the tropics of Australia with a celebrity creationist, Will Storr asked himself a simple question. Why don’t facts work? Why, that is, did the obviously intelligent man beside him sincerely believe in Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden and a six-thousand-year-old Earth, in spite of the evidence against them?

It was the start of a journey that would lead Storr all over the world—from Texas to Warsaw to the Outer Hebrides—meeting an extraordinary cast of modern heretics whom he tries his best to understand. Storr tours Holocaust sites with famed denier David Irving and a band of neo-Nazis, experiences his own murder during “past life regression” hypnosis, discusses the looming One World Government with an iconic climate skeptic, and investigates the tragic life and death of a woman who believed her parents were high priests in a baby-eating cult.

Using a unique mix of highly personal memoir, investigative journalism, and the latest research from neuroscience and experimental psychology, Storr reveals how the stories we tell ourselves about the world invisibly shape our beliefs, and how the neurological “hero maker” inside us all can so easily lead to self-deception, toxic partisanship and science denial.

Praise for The Unpersuadables

“Throws new and salutary light on all our conceits and beliefs. Very valuable, and a great read to boot, this is investigative journalism of the highest order.” — Independent, Book of the Week

“Storr can open chapters like a stage conjurer, and his prose has an easy, laconic style embracing Jon Ronson’s taste for the fabulously weird and Louis Theroux’s ability to put his subjects at ease. He is a funny and companionable guide . . . [who] confounds expectations.” —Guardian

Will Storr is a journalist who has dressed up as a woman to impress the transsexual leader of radical pro-suicide campaigners, trained in jungle warfare with the British army, and has been arrested and then deported under armed guard from Los Angeles. He is the author of Will Storr vs. The Supernatural and has written for many publications and won many awards.